In fact, the article seems to be mostly about women (largely in the gaming press) interacting with the still-all-too-ugly disposition of the anonymous hoards of gaming fans that interact with them
Exactly. This entire article is basically along the lines of "I'm a woman, and I have received some very nasty insulting text via means of email, Twitter, or whatever. Some of it used terms that could only be directed at females." Look, these women need to learn how to ignore non-credible rape and assault threats. Does anyone have a single example of one such woman actually being raped or assaulted by an internet troll, you know, in real life?
The only way to deal with this is absolute zero tolerance policies, at least on forums (literal or otherwise) that you have any control over.
No, the way to deal with it is to teach these women how to ignore people on the internet and/or grow a thicker skin. I learnt pretty quickly - the hard way - to ignore people who were acting like dicks on the internet, within a year of starting to use it. I mastered that pretty well. These women don't seem to want to bother with that. By all means, give people the power to easily ignore someone (I'm sure it already exists on most services) but I wouldn't go down the "zero tolerance" route. Who's going to be deciding what's unacceptable speech? Feminists and social justice warriors, and ANY criticism of them they decide they don't like will be collateral damage of this aggressive censorship. People need to learn to get over things.
And for fuck's sake Slashdot, stop equating internet trolling to credible "daily harrassment of woman" - that makes it sound a lot more serious than it really is.